Reading is a necessary requirement for higher education, for holding most jobs and for successfully maneuvering everyday life. In order to better understand the reasons why individuals fail to learn to read or fail to read well, it is important to understand how the normal reading process works. This work investigates reading and language comprehension. All of the experiments use eye-tracking to investigate factors that influence the time-course of event comprehension, by measuring the time course of eye-movement disruption to plausibility violations. 2 experiments explore the time course over which world knowledge, contextual knowledge and linguistic knowledge are used during reading in order to address questions of whether some comprehension processes are informationally encapsulated. 4 additional experiments address whether memory constraints that have been hypothesized to affect the process of linguistic structure building (E. Gibson, 1998; Warren & Gibson, 2002) and knowledge integration in text processing (Myers & O'Brien, 1998) also affect the interpretation of events in single sentences. This research bears on theoretical issues of whether the same cognitive constraints affect comprehension processes and representation construction at the syntactic level, the event interpretation level and high-level text interpretation level. This research will also add to our understanding of eye-movement responses to plausibjlity violations and have implications that may: 1) affect the theoretical interpretation of experiments using plausibility manipulations to drive parsing (e.g. Clifton et al, 2003; Ferriera & Clifton, 1986; Speer & Clifton, 1998; Trueswell et al, 1994) and 2) contrubute to determining what kinds of higher level interpretation processes are relevant for models of eye-movement control such as E-Z reader (Reichle, Rayner & Pollatsek, 2003).